Now we have proof that the crazies grabbed control of the asylum and bullies are shaking down and thumping – not entirely figuratively – Republicans in the halls of the US Senate.

Maine’s two usually reasonable and moderate Republican Senators – Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe – spent the summer trying to find ways to support health care reform, including some form of a public option. Suddenly, they did an abrupt about-face: No public option, no non-profit co-ops, no triggers, no anything in the bill they’d previously supported.

So what happened?

“Over the last week, they were bombarded with calls, elevator and hallway chats, and e-mails from the RNC, the Senate leadership, other Senators, people on the party’s Senate campaign committee, serious donors,” a senior GOP Senate staffer explains to me Tuesday afternoon by phone.

“Basically, the message was the same” he insists. “Support health care in any form and face serious, well-funded primary challenges when they’re up for re-election.”

(As an aside, the Senate Republican Campaign Committee used to be run by John Ensign, resident of the infamous C Street Home For The Perpetually Bewildered, and best known for sleeping with an aide, hiring her 19-year-old son as a “strategic consultant” to the SRCC, firing another aide who happened to be married to the woman Ensign was hiking the Appalachian Trail with, and then having his mommy and daddy provide $96,000 in “gifts” to the aides and two of their three children to smooth everything over. So we know how the SRCC operation works.)

The GOP Is Fringe
Since Snowe’s term expires in 2012 and Collins isn’t up for re-election until 2014, that seems like a long spell for the goofball right of the Republican party in Maine to stay mad. After all, Snow received 74% of the vote when she was re-elected in 2006, a year when Republicans all over the country were being booted from office without so much as a good riddance.

“Because you’re not part of the party, you don’t know how it operates these days,” the man reminds me.

“The fringe is the party,” he says, the emphasis his. “Between now and 2012 or 2014, the goofballs can show up at every town meeting, state fair, and garage door opening ceremony either one of them attends. Their life would become a living hell.”

The staffer would not let his name be used because he’s not authorized to speak with reporters, nor would the five other people who work on the Republican side of the Senate who essentially confirmed his comments. But I’ve known each of them for years, trust information they provide because each has always been accurate, and none have an axe to grind.

Calls to Senators Snowe and Collins were not returned by the time I filed this article. But I was directed to a statement on Snowe’s website that claims if, “after we have implemented landmark insurance market reforms, private insurers fail to deliver the affordable coverage Americans require” she would support, maybe, down-the-road, possibly something that resembles a public option.

That would be when? Maybe in 2066, on the millennial anniversary of Magna Carta? How many more than the 62-million already uninsured and underinsured Americans must go without seeing a doctor, maybe die, file for bankruptcy or go to bed every night hoping their kids don’t get sick tomorrow before Snow and her colleague Susan Collins see the world as it really is?

Ashamed by GOP
In her website statement, Snowe also trots out the totally discredited notion that reform will lead “to a government takeover of health care.”

No wonder another GOP-side Senate staffer confesses to me, a touch of sadness in her voice, “Right now, I’m ashamed to be a Republican.”

Despite the fact that this same staff member gave her full-throated support to the McCain-Palin ticket and that didn’t seem to shame her, nor did George Bush’s eight years, I am willing to accept the divine intervention leading to her Come To Jesus awakening in the spirit in which she offers it. Better late than never.

Oh wait. Maybe she’s seeing the light because her brother-in-law and sister are struggling to cope with medical bills: Their 10-year-old was diagnosed with leukemia earlier this year, and there’s a constant fight with the insurance company supposedly providing coverage to pay for the child’s treatment.

I know what that’s like. I’ve been through it with my sister, which I’ll write about tomorrow in comparing what happens when someone gets seriously ill in the States and what my personal experience has been coping with major illness here in Canada.

Snowe Job
I’m not sure what Snowe and Collins are up to but, clearly, it has nothing to do with what is best for one-fifth of the American population directly and the rest of us indirectly.

Sadly, the Snowe Job being pulled is totally uncharacteristic of both Senators. In the past, they’ve acted like Responsible Republicans most of the time – even when I disagreed with them. Now, they’ve become no better than the louts who got their mad on in Washington Saturday afternoon. The fear Snowe and Collins have of that small but vocal slice of the Republican Party is driving them to put their own interests ahead of those of the nation.

There is an irony to the predicament Snowe and Collins are in.

Dick Cheney spent eight years scaring Americans into doing what the GOP wanted. Neither Collins or Snowe spoke out then. Now, the GOP is scaring Republicans into doing what a tiny minority of lunatics wants them to do and the hell with the rest of us.

About Charley James

If you are born in Milwaukee, chances are you're born a Democrat. So, I gravitated naturally to liberal politics as an activist and a journalist. I've been writing since I was eight and, after working in newsrooms for far too long, I have devoted much of the past decade as an independent investigtative jouralist. For much of the past year, I've been writing about homelessness - America's immorality play.

Comments

UPDATE – Sept. 20 – Within a day of this story breaking here in the LA Progressive, Sen. Snowe was busy running up to anyone she spotted in the Capitol holding a microphone or a notepad to claim that no one in the GOP is going to tell her how to vote on reforming the medico-insurance complex.

While I’d like to take all of the credit, a new poll taken of Maine voters may have played a part. It shows that 78% of them favour a public option – including about 40% of Republicans.

I am a Canadian, and our health care system is taking quite a beating as a political football in the American health care debate.

I must admit I’m amazed at the political rhetoric which distorts at best and outright lies at worst about our government health insurance.

I am completely befuddled by the propaganda… the specter of government bureaucrats getting between patient and doctor; but complete acceptance of insurance company bureaucrats doing exactly that. Surely your government merits some trust and is capable of running some things? It seems to do a good job running your armed forces. After watching the economic melt down, I don’t think your business leaders merit trust more than your politicians.

I can’t believe that the Republicans purposely direct discussion away from the fact that there are more Americans uninsured than the entire population of Canada, to discussions about tort reform. In Canada, I can’t name a single doctor who has been sued, nor can I name a single person without health care. Surely both are desirable goals.

In a country which has the world’s best doctors, and the ability to solve all the problems involved with putting a man on the moon, surely you can solve the health care problem if you really care about your fellow citizens. And surely you could do that without trashing your neighbors’ health care system.

The Body Politic

Dave Zirin: She is our Jordan. She is our Jim Brown. She is our Babe Ruth, calling his shots. She is no longer content to dodge bullets, but understands how to stop them. Serena is that rare athlete who has not only mastered her sport. She’s harnessed it.